serendipityoucity

Today’s Sunday morning was dedicated to getting up when i woke up, irrespective of the time, jasmine pearl tea, Espace Musique, peanut butter on pan negro rye bread, pillows and Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons.  Soon I will water my newly planted trees to to round off the morning!

Hemmungs Wirten took me on a historical journey among many other places, to the commons, gleaners, loppers, commoners, enclosure, labour and public. One of the many facts I gleaned from her work, was that there never was a free for all commons. The commons was always bound in the realm of private property and a host of customary use rights. And very elaborate customary rights existed regarding the use of land.  Lords allowed commoners to use the commons for their subsistence, having property also entailed propriety, the priviledge of property was connected with obligations to others.  Enclosure of the commons pushed aside customary rights of use, seperating users from their rights.

The changes from village to town, from town to city, and from city to metropolis are infrastructural leaps and bounds that do not happen overnight.  The momentum is irreversible, and when the struggle for the rural commons is more or less over, the battle scene relocates elsewhere.  In the city, it takes on a new identity.  Suddenly we get a public for whom the rights associated with the commons no longer have much to do with their survival.  Now working as wage laborers in the industrial economy, this new collective is in need of space, air, and the aesthetic dimension of open green parks in order to endure their day to day existence.  For that to be possible, others are endowed with the ability to speak for that public, act in their best interest by proxy, and work to guarantee that the urban commons survives for them in order to achieve that ultimate goal: public health. Unless provided with such an outlet, in no time the public can turn into a mob, a crowd and an amorphous mass.

We cannot even imagine a public on a rural commons.  In our imagination commoners are still peasants, whose gleaning, stooping, and use of the wastes of agricultural or modern society is both a social and collective act but also one that makes you think of poverty.  In France the right to glean was also known as the patrimony of the poor…A public is something else, because as members of it we assume that we are engaged, not in the small talk of apple picking, but in that informed conversation with others…Even more crucially, we see others and ourselves in particular settings that control and guide our behaviour.  While it has become commonplace to draw attention to the commons as an alternative space when critizing the expansion of intellectual property, one would be hard pressed to find anyone in that camp defining himself or herself as a commoner…the image of the commons is appealing, but the experience of the commoner is not. (p.153-154)

So what! Well commoners disapear as public appears.  And with public, we see a seperation of users from their rights, and few institutions that protect was is considered public, or the public domain.  Where does the public go when resources are overexploited in the public domain? What conventions protect the public domain? What standards protect it? Which working group overseas this? Of course those are supposed to be our governments.  But where exactly in government?  The Greenbelt and Gatineau Park are always threatened by development, especially roads.  You can use parks in Montreal, but some parks have use rights ensuring that the homeless do not set up camp.  A CivicAccess.ca user, wanted to digitize a map he found in the public library, produced by the City of Ottawa.  This map included the location of all the public parks in the City.  He wanted to add those parks in a Google Mashup and tag each park with the City’s proposed development for those spaces.  He was not allowed to create such a map and we were deprived of comprehensive information about our public space.  Where does he go to argue our case?

We know that our City has many advisory committees:

1. Accessibility
2. Arts, Heritage and Culture
3. Business
4. Environmental
5. Equity and Diversity
6. French Language Services
7. Health and Social Services
8. Local Architectural Conservation
9. Ottawa Forests and Greenspace
10. Parks and Recreation
11. Pedestrian and Transit
12. Poverty Issues
13. Roads and Cycling
14. Rural Issues Advisory Committee
15. Seniors

And also Standing Committees:

1. Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee
2. Community and Protective Services Committee
3. Corporate Services and Economic Development Committee
4. Planning and Environment Committee
5. Transit Committee 
6. Transportation Committee

And these meet on a regular basis and are open to the public.

We also have a city council comprised of 23 city councilors.  If anyone has payed attention to Ottawa lately, you will know that we have a serious municipal geopolitical split between urban, suburban and rural wards!  The last vote on the sole source unsolicited redevelopment plan for Frank Clair Stadium and the Transit strike during the coldest months of the year are clear markers of those divisions and disjunctures.

Alas, there is no committee that oversees nor one councilor that addresses issues related to data, information, infrastructure, science and related technologies.  I also cannot seem to find a chief information officer.  Where would one go to discuss access to public data? To develop decision making principles regarding disclosure of public data? To discuss the development of technologies and services to enable access? Licensing? Fees? To assess what is the public domain? The sharing of socio-demographic-health-economic data within the city?  How do citizens participate in evidenced based decision making? The role of citizens and re-invigorating participatory democracy and so on…

I wonder if a Data, Information and Geospatial and Communication Infrastructure Advisory Committee should be developed. Do any of these exist anywhere else?  There is a senate Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (INDU), but it does not really deal with what is public and issues related to data, albeit some of us would like it to.  It will be difficult to discuss public in a committee whose primary focus is industry! Would it be worth it. What of the provinces? Should CIOs be in IT departments? Who would sit on these?